“IT MAKES you question Gerry Anderson’s sanity,” grimaces Matt Stone as he contemplates the collected work of the man behind numerous cult puppet shows (“Supermarionation” as Anderson calls it) including Stingray, Captain Scarlet and Thunderbirds.

Stone describes making his and South Park co-creator Trey Parker’s own all-puppet feature Team America: World Police (see review), a musical pastiche of Jerry Bruckheimer’s big-budget action flicks, as “the hardest thing I’ve ever done, physically and emotionally. It was horrible. I don’t regret it but I would never, ever do it again.”

Satirising Bruckheimer’s phenomenally successful mix of slick excess, machismo and jingoism isn’t in itself new (see the Hot Shots! films); indeed some would say overblown epics such as Armageddon and Top Gun are already self-parodies. Using marionettes, however, was the original twist.

“It gives you a lot of ideas that you haven’t seen before,” says Stone, an affably animated 33-year old. “We wanted it to be a little more hi-tech than Thunderbirds and that era, but not too much more — to still have that wooden look.”

Manipulating their 2 ft-high stars around some impressively detailed miniature sets (croissant-shaped cobblestones in Paris) proved a huge frustration, though not the only one. “It was really hard to try and make a Bruckheimer movie and make a good movie,” Stone grins. “Every time we structured it like a Bruckheimer movie it would be shitty. To this day I can’t figure it out.”

Still, it’s not so much Top Gun spoofery that’s fired such outrage Stateside, nor even the ludicrously extended, initially censored puppet sex scene. Starting as a typical indictment of gung-ho American intervention — the first scene has Team America’s elite security force “rescue” Paris from terrorists but inadvertently level the Eiffel Tower — Parker and Stone rapidly shift allegiance.

It turns out there are two more potent dangers than the World Police: the warmongering North Korean dictator Kim Jong II; and his eventual co-conspirators, the deluded coterie of Hollywood thespians such as Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn and the “Film Actors Guild” (FAG). In a twice-repeated scatological mantra, Team America is defended as well-meaning if blundering “dicks”, necessary to combat psychopathic “a**holes” (Kim).

The savage lampooning — and eventual graphic dismemberment — of Baldwin and Co, set aside the conspicuous absence of any political figures, has led to accusations that Parker and Stone are quietly endorsing a stance one could easily imagine being dreamt up by George W. Bush in his well-lubricated frat-boy days. Stone dismisses this, remaining adamant that the film isn’t even “an overtly political movie”.

“We put Bush and Kerry in a draft of the script but then suddenly the whole movie was about them and this election. It took all the responsibility and culpability and emotion off the audience; it just wasn’t as challenging. The whole idea wasn’t to answer those questions as much as to play with all that stuff and have the film be a little bit of a pressure valve.”

Sean Penn may have been overheating when he sent the pair an open letter chiding their “ignorance”. To Stone not only was it great extra publicity for Team America but also confirmed why they targeted outspoken celebrities in the first place.

“There’s the philosophical highbrow way to put it,” he offers, “which is the inflated sense of self-importance one gets when one is a celebrity — something I can personally attest to. To us there’s a world of difference between Bob Dylan writing a protest song or Sean Penn making a political movie, but that wasn’t what was going on in America. You’d turn on the TV and see some military guy telling you why we should go to war and then Sean Penn telling you why you shouldn’t. That’s just funny to me.”

Stone gives a throaty chuckle. “The lowbrow version is it’s just fun to make a puppet out of those guys and f****** shoot ’em.”

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